Friday, July 25, 2014

Telstra will conduct commercial trials using 20MHz of the 700MHz spectrum band at six locations around Australia, including Perth, ahead of rolling out more 4G 700MHz services in a range of cities and regional centres from January 2015.

“4G Advanced technology is the next evolution of our 4G service and brings together two spectrum bands - 700MHz and 1800MHz - to serve up ultra-fast data speeds," said Mike Wright, Telstra Group Managing Director Networks. It will be capable of providing customers double the speeds they currently experience on the 4G network, plus better 4G coverage indoors and beyond."

In May 2014, Telstra has demonstrated downlink speeds of 450 Mbps using LTE Advanced Carrier Aggregation across a trial combination of 1800MHz and 2600MHz bands over its live network. Telstra worked with Ericsson to install equipment for two new 4G Frequency Division Duplexing (FDD) channels of 20MHz bandwidth each on the 2600MHz spectrum band (40MHz FDD), aggregated with live 20MHz of 4G on the 1800MHz band. The result was three simultaneous side-by-side paths for the data to travel through to the operational core network. Telstra also used an advanced prototype Cat 9 engineering device that could combine the three channels to achieve these speeds.

In February 2014, Ericsson and Qualcomm Technologies conducted the first inter-vendor interoperability testing of LTE Category 6, which promises potential speeds of up to 300 Mbps.The final stages of testing, which were completed in collaboration with Telstra, was based on ready-to-release versions of Ericsson's L14A software release. Ericsson said its L14A software leverages load balancing for better spectrum efficiency and improved user experience during high-load situations. It supports all bandwidth and frequency combinations for up to 40MHz Carrier Aggregation, providing users with speeds of up to 300 Mbps. The test also used Qualcomm;s fourth-generation 3G/LTE multimode modem, the Qualcomm Gobi 9x35 chipset.